For all the talk that Republicans and Democrats don't see eye to eye, there is one place where they agree: spending. And lots of it. Sure, there are some Hill conservatives who will raise a ruckus and mean it -- but the appetite for real reform is gone. And this week's debt deal proves it.

"If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If the federal deficit and federal debt are problems," Jay Nordlinger half-jokes, "but no one talks about them, do they cease to be problems?" Most of Congress sure hopes so. In what should have been a messier debate over whether to raise America's credit limit or try to curb spending first, most members let the issue go without a fight. With just days to go before the House adjourns for August, the proposal hatched by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin seems like a shoe-in, despite failing -- miserably -- to do anything about our monster-sized debt. Even President Trump signaled his support, which was somewhat of a surprise since the agreement falls woefully short of the cuts his own budget demanded.

Instead, the president and other Republicans hailed the spike in defense spending -- hoping that will smooth things over with a base who's tired of hearing excuses for these record deficits. Republican Study Committee Chair Mike Johnson (R-La.), who's just as frustrated by the lack of accountability in both parties, bemoaned the $2 trillion in new spending -- especially since it comes with virtually no strings attached. Even the $77 billion in token offsets are a drop in the bucket of America's red ink. "...The price alone is far outside of what Congress should be allocating. With more than $22 trillion in debt, we simply cannot afford deals like this one. I am disappointed Democrats denied the administration even modest concessions, and I will continue to make the case for restoring fiscal sanity in the Congress."

Like Mick Mulvaney, who worries that there isn't the stomach in either party to slash spending, former Congressman Dave Brat understands this is an all-hands-on-deck situation. And both sides are equally to blame. While Democrats would love to pile on the IOUs with free college, health care for illegals, and their Green New Deal, the reality is that Republicans are just as responsible for ignoring the problem that got us here. When the GOP was in complete control of Congress, did they cut back? No, they continued to spend -- blowing through money that our kids and grandkids will be on the hook to repay.

In the end, Brat said, Congress's addiction is "ripping off the American family." Yes, "it takes huge discipline, [but] the Republican Party needs to fight harder." When I asked him how long the country could sustain this, he told listeners on Tuesday's "Washington Watch" to look across the pond.

"There's evidence you can be pathetic for a long time," he said, "And the evidence is called Europe. But eventually, that debt will impinge on your economic growth rate as it has been. And what's really missed in the point is [that] it's intergenerational theft. And I mean that quite literally. We are stealing from our kids and the next generation to the extent that our deficit is $1 trillion. We're spending $1 trillion and getting the goods right now -- and the kids are going to have to pay for [everything] we're consuming. And so it is literally theft. So they're going to have to work hard, pay their taxes, get tax increases, pay off the debt, and pay all their own personal bills for our runaway spending binge."

But it's not just Republicans and Democrats who are to blame here, he points out. It's the American people, who haven't made this issue a priority. Only 48 percent of the country thinks deficit-reduction should be a priority. That's a 24-point drop from the Obama years. What happened? Well, the debt didn't go away, but our stomach for dealing with it certainly has. "The American people aren't getting it," Brat insisted. When experts bring up the economic disaster barreling down the track, the response is always the same: crickets.

From a spiritual and moral perspective, the issue is black and white. We're stewards of this money. "The Bible is simple; the truths [about borrowing and stealing] are simple. Everybody knows it's just whether you want to eat your spinach," Dave explained, "and the American people are saying, 'No, we want ongoing consumption and spending -- even if the next generation pays.'"

It's like a monetary game of musical chairs, passing the debt from one generational to the next. But at some point, the music stops -- and somebody's going to be left standing. It is time to act so that it is not our children and grandchildren left standing -- holding the bill.

Tony Perkins' Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.

"It was easier than signing a cell phone contract." That's how Helena, who identified as transgender at age 15, described getting her first hormone prescription. She didn't need a therapist's approval or any kind of assessment when she walked in the clinic. "You just need to go sign the paper, and they'll give you the [drugs]." Seventeen months of testosterone later, she wished she'd never taken it.

Helena is just one of the voices warning parents and teenagers to stop listening to the culture when it comes to gender confusion. "It's a social contagion," she insists. For kids who have trouble fitting in, like she did, transitioning is one way that social media tells them they'll be popular. "It was very much the 'in' thing to do," she told Madeleine Kearns. But, like a lot of young people who've walked away from that lifestyle, Helena looks back and shudders. "I don't think I had a very good understanding ... that the things I [was doing were] going to affect me in 20 years. Which is why I think it's so messed up that it's so easy for a person like me to get hormones."

Dr. Michelle Cretella, head of the American College of Pediatricians, agrees -- and blames the medical community for being complicit in this dangerous agenda. In a letter to U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams, ACP is sounding the alarm over what they call a "grave public health concern impacting children and adolescents diagnosed with gender dysphoria (GD)." It is, they point out, "an issue so dire that the Royal College of General Practitioners in the United Kingdom issued an unprecedented warning to the public earlier this month."

Without any sort of long-term testing, drugs and life-altering surgeries are being suggested to minors as the new "standard of care." That's wrong, she insists, especially since 61-98 percent of affected children "will outgrow their GD if allowed to progress through natural puberty." These are toxic hormones, Dr. Cretella explained on Tuesday's "Washington Watch," being given to children as young as eight -- and, in some cases, without their parents' permission.

"This is pure insanity," she told listeners. "This is not medicine... We're talking about [kids] between ages eight and 12 being pumped full of synthetic hormones that have serious side effects -- in combination with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones... [We're sentencing kids] to a lifetime of dependence on these drugs, which put them at risk for heart attack, strokes, diabetes, cancers and continued suicidal ideation or thoughts... It's institutionalized child abuse."

What's worse, Dr. Cretella points out, very few people in the medical community are willing to speak out. "We have physicians and drug companies profiting off of the suffering of children... [when what they really need is] therapy and sound counseling to get at any sort of underlying issue." Before this "wholesale promotion of transgenderism," she points out, doctors were cautious. They knew that "the vast majority of children who were confused about their sex, if they were supported through natural puberty, they outgrew the confusion." That's been documented, she explains in 11 studies. "But again, that was before all the transgender propaganda."

Now, there are actually whistleblowers in clinics as far away as the U.K. "who are aghast at what's being done to these children. They've come out and said, 'Look, we have evidence that these children are suffering harm,' but that evidence is being suppressed." That's why, Dr. Cretella says, her organization decided to send the letter now -- before the situation gets worse.

The doctors who are asking questions are being reprimanded, she warned -- "or they're basically sent for reeducation." "It's politicized medicine," she says sadly. And there are physicians in areas of authority who are willingly embracing "ideology over science." Maybe with good intentions, she admits, but "there's no science to back it up." And science -- along with courage -- is the only hope for young people like Helena. Let's hope Surgeon General Adams agrees.

Tony Perkins' Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) seems incredibly concerned with animal cruelty. But when it comes to newborn babies? Not so much. The man behind the infamous light display for infanticide has apparently decided that it's mean to declaw cats. Dismembering tiny humans, on the other hand, gets a hearty standing ovation.

For American states, it's a first. When the far-Left governor inked his name on a law that makes it a crime to surgically remove a cat's claws, pro-lifers couldn't help but see the irony. "Declawing is a cruel and painful procedure that can create physical and behavioral problems for helpless animals, and today it stops. By banning this archaic practice, we will ensure that animals are no longer subjected to these inhumane and unnecessary procedures," Cuomo said in a statement.

Funny, he didn't seem to mind the inhumanity of leaving a perfectly healthy newborn abortion survivor to die -- or the "cruel and painful procedure" that literally rips a living child to pieces. Where was Cuomo's horror at the kind of surgery that, Dr. Anthony Levatino explains, involves "reaching into a woman's uterus with forceps and 'grabbing whatever is there. Maybe you rip off a leg, which is about four-inches long,' then you pull out 'an arm, the spine. The skull is the most difficult part. Sometimes there's a little face staring up at you."

Unlike kittens, babies don't survive that inhumanity. Which is apparently just fine with this governor of double standards.

Tony Perkins' Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.

Tony Perkins' Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.